Sunday 20 June 2010 19.05 EDT
First published on Sunday 20 June 2010 19.05 EDT

When I succeeded John Perkin as the Guardian's crossword editor in 1996 I was not told what was expected of me, beyond ensuring that six cryptic and six quick puzzles continued to appear each week. Though the Manchester Guardian ran its first crossword in 1929, John was the first person to have been given the title of crossword editor and I was thus only the second.

The hierarchy clearly understood in a general way that its crosswords mattered. The importance of not messing with the crosswords was highlighted at the time of the paper's 1997 redesign, when both the cryptic and the quick puzzles were put in the same section of the paper. The resulting telephone calls, letters and emails far outnumbered all those on other aspects of the redesign put together. These protests and cries for help came from the length and breadth of Guardian country, where readers found themselves fighting turf wars over the same section or, worse, tearing it in two. Otherwise, except when some word deemed to be non-PC has crept into a puzzle, like "chav" earlier this month, the crosswords have been very much left to carry on without editorial supervision.

His most important single decision was that the cryptic setters, until then anonymous, should have noms de plume. This came out of his policy, still firmly followed today, of deliberately running cryptic puzzles of quite widely differing character and degree of solving difficulty. Almost all other publications have crossword puzzles that are commissioned and edited to be fairly homogeneous, so that their solvers know roughly what they are going to get each time.

Perkin's view was that this policy was too restrictive. If the level of difficulty was consistently too hard, you would be discouraged from even trying. And, if it was consistently too easy, the satisfaction level of solving the puzzles would soon fall. So we aim to run two harder, two easier and two middling level puzzles each week.

This mixed policy is to encourage those who assume that any cryptic clue must be beyond them to have a go and to surprise themselves by discovering that they are wrong. And, since the beauty of the crossword puzzle as a pastime is that enjoyment can be had without necessarily having to complete the whole thing, solving part of a hard puzzle can be quite as rewarding as solving all of an easy one. Also, the noms de plume allow you to know who you are up against that day and to recognise a particular setter's personal foibles and hobbyhorses.

In the last decade the website had allowed us to take this policy further. Not only does theguardian.com/crosswords give you all the current Guardian and Observer puzzles (and access to a large archive of past ones), but we have added online a weekly "easy" cryptic (the Quiptic) and a monthly prize "snorter" (the Genius).

In 1970 Perkin introduced daily quick puzzles alongside the cryptics and decided that they should be set in batches by cryptic setters (currently these are Araucaria, Chifonie and Paul). This, I think, gives the Guardian quick puzzle a slightly quirky, and even occasionally a slightly cryptic flavour, lacking in such puzzles elsewhere. For instance, you might find that a quick clue for FIG LEAF in the Guardian included a phrase like "first-day cover?"